We analyze tournaments of heterogeneous players from an organizer’s perspective. Using a simple model of a noisy tournament, we demonstrate how the likelihood of selecting the best player, here termed the “predictive power” of a tournament, depends on the tournament format, the...

The round-robin tournament format for N players is a scheme that matches players with one another in all possible N(N - 1)/2 pairwise comparisons. A noisy round-robin tournament adds the possibility of upsets, or noise, and hence reduces the power of the tournament to reveal the true ranking of...

Tournaments of heterogeneous candidates can be thought of as probabilistic mechanisms that select high-quality agents. We quantify the efficiency of such selection by the likelihood of selecting the best player, here termed the "predictive power." We study three widely used tournament formats:...

The unskilled-and-unaware problem is a cognitive illusion resulting in a negative relationship between one's skill level and self-assessment bias: the less skilled are, on average, more unaware of the absolute and relative quality of their performance. In this paper, we study whether, and to...

We analyze tournaments of heterogeneous players from an organizer's perspective. Using a simple model of a noisy tournament, we demonstrate how the likelihood of selecting the best player, here termed the "predictive power" of a tournament, depends on the tournament format, the distribution of...

We study a setting where a buyer chooses one of several available options whose values are initially unknown but can be discovered through costly search. Search is sequential, with perfect recall, which implies it is optimal for the buyer to search until the best option encountered so far...

We explore experimentally a cognitive-effort channel through which defaults might influence behavior in an environment where the choice architect has misaligned incentives. Our experimental setting is an insurance market where the firm is better informed about the aggregate statistical risk...